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Turning down detail levels to raise a benchmark score? What is going on here? I am astonished at the things I have read in this review.

You jumped the gun a bit there man...
When Hokie said he turned down the detail level, hes talking about when he benched his Sparkle GTX 580 orginally for submitting to hwbot for our bench team. Everyone does this for the bot.
But not for reviews, Hokie did everything at defaults as far as I can tell. And made an excellent review.

Damn Im 'ing over here....!! Tax return? maybe seeing it has some badass Eyefinity power, and I can buy the monitors one at a time.

Hokie... any ideas on subzero performance? Is that coming in the near future?

Not yet. Without voltage control it's pretty much moot. Hopefully we'll get either solid voltage control via software or hard-mod info soon. If either of those happens, I'll be requesting that loaner pot IMOG mentioned.

Originally Posted by David

Nice review.

I only had time to skim it - are there any full SNB-E results? Unleash all the SNB-E cores, overclocked, with an overclocked 7970 then an overclocked 580. It should net you some pretty high scores, and give you an idea how the top (single card) set-up these days should perform?

I suspect of course that most people with SNB-E cash will not stop at one GPU

Thanks. There were full runs, yes; check out the "Putting Some Horsepower Behind The 7970" section for full SNB-E + 7970 results.

Originally Posted by Ivy

Did they truly achieve 1125 MHZ only by using CCC and without any volt mods?

Yep, easy as that. Put Power Tune on the +20% level and crank it up to CCC's max. On auto, it barely even spun up the fan speed during testing.

Originally Posted by dejo

very informative review, Jeremy. I love ready most of the ocforums future product reviews, and this was no different.

I think that the msi afterburner 2.2 beta is supposed to be updated for this card. dont have the card to test. You can either try it yourself or send me the card to try.

Thanks! I tried the most recent version I could find (failed miserably) and then we asked MSI for any in-house betas. They don't have one that functions yet but are working on it. I have some (slim) hope that they'll have a working beta by the time partners launch on January 9th.

Originally Posted by mxthunder

So, someone reviewed this card, but didn't even know what the power tune feature of CCC increases?
Hard to take it seriously when I read things like that.

Turning down detail levels to raise a benchmark score? What is going on here? I am astonished at the things I have read in this review.

Sigh. PowerTune increases "board power". What it really does is peg the p-states as high as they can go to force the board to operate at its max TDP at all times. What I wrote was a tongue-in-cheek response to not having a clue how that actually affects voltage. Can you tell me precisely how much voltage that setting increases on what components from what's available at 0% to put it at max TDP?

All detail levels were set as high as they could go for every test (except for AvP: Default, as noted in the review...AvP high-as-it-would-go is right below that result).

If you're complaining about my mention of using LoD when I was running 3DMark06 on a different card (not this one), you are obviously not a benchmarker. That is common practice among anybody who has a clue what they're doing on HWBot. That was referring to competitive benchmarking and had nothing to do with the results when comparing it to other cards. If you had actually read the paragraph, you would have also seen that I did that on the Sparkle X580 trying to get a better score but did NOT do it on this card and it still beat out the X580.

The HD7970 seems to handle high res, high AA, tessellation, and DX11 very well by looking at the Heaven, STALKER, AvP, and BF3 results. I'm surprised using 3DMark software we only get a less than 10% improvement over the GTX580, and the GTX580 performed better in HAWX2 and Dirt2.

This card desperately needs some voltage control. 1125MHz on stock volts is nuts!

I was surprised about HAWX 2 & Dirt 2 too. It's almost as if there is a limit to its low-power-computing ability. I know that makes no sense, it's just how the results 'feel'. When you crank the detail, MSAA and tesselation up though, it powers through like (literally) no other.

Benchmarks didn't surprise me per se', but the relationship is interesting. The HD6970-to-GTX580 improvment is remarkably similar to the GTX580-to-HD7970 improvement.

Not yet. Without voltage control it's pretty much moot. Hopefully we'll get either solid voltage control via software or hard-mod info soon. If either of those happens, I'll be requesting that loaner pot IMOG mentioned.

Thanks. There were full runs, yes; check out the "Putting Some Horsepower Behind The 7970" section for full SNB-E + 7970 results.

Yep, easy as that. Put Power Tune on the +20% level and crank it up to CCC's max. On auto, it barely even spun up the fan speed during testing.

Thanks! I tried the most recent version I could find (failed miserably) and then we asked MSI for any in-house betas. They don't have one that functions yet but are working on it. I have some (slim) hope that they'll have a working beta by the time partners launch on January 9th.

Sigh. PowerTune increases "board power". What it really does is peg the p-states as high as they can go to force the board to operate at its max TDP at all times. What I wrote was a tongue-in-cheek response to not having a clue how that actually affects voltage. Can you tell me precisely how much voltage that setting increases on what components from what's available at 0% to put it at max TDP?

All detail levels were set as high as they could go for every test (except for AvP: Default, as noted in the review...AvP high-as-it-would-go is right below that result).

If you're complaining about my mention of using LoD when I was running 3DMark06 on a different card (not this one), you are obviously not a benchmarker. That is common practice among anybody who has a clue what they're doing on HWBot. That was referring to competitive benchmarking and had nothing to do with the results when comparing it to other cards. If you had actually read the paragraph, you would have also seen that I did that on the Sparkle X580 trying to get a better score but did NOT do it on this card and it still beat out the X580.

Not questioning your knowledge, it just seems like something funny to say in a review.
Nope, im not a "benchmarker" I run these tests at defaults so I can get a true, relevant score with other people.
Powertune does not change the voltage at all, it just allows for a higher voltage ceiling for when you do crank it up, so that it doesn't throttle back when it finds out its going way over tdp

That card does look phenomenal. Now to see if the rumors of a 580 price drop come to fruition. I don't have room for another (I'm happy with both of mine ) but that 7970 is definitely a solid performer.

I like it although i am not a reference card style fan so i think i will stick with the MSI 6970 i want until i can see a better priced non-reference card available which i know will not be till some time late next year.

I would say, welcome to the power of the seven. I7, Radeon 7, 79X, Win 7. Its rapidly growing to a serious marketing name... a simple number but apparently it brings luck. Maybe there is more than just a mistletoe.

Powertune does not change the voltage at all, it just allows for a higher voltage ceiling for when you do crank it up, so that it doesn't throttle back when it finds out its going way over tdp

I'm not sure that is accurate. On Bulldozer, a change in P-state directly correlates to a change in frequency as well as power. This can be readily observed by running PSCheck. There isn't a publicly available tool like PSCheck for this card, however I would expect that a change in P-state via Powertune would correlate with a change in base Voltage. I don't know obviously, just wondering on the topic.

From what i know the 7000 series does indeed contain that zero core ability. It seems to work as follow: People will have to set "turn monitor off" in the Win energy saving settings. At that moment it happens the GPU will almost completly disable itself and the fan will stop to work, it kinda will reach a hibernate mode but as soon as the screen is turned ON (simply move the mouse) then the GPU instantly will come alive. In that condition it seems to only use 3 W of power. Seems like thats a worlds first by Radeon.

However, the usual idle mode, with screensaver and such, is in need of aproximately 15 W, which is aswell a increase because previously a GPU needed above 24 W. In standart Idle mode it will clock itself down a very high margin, several times lower clock, thats how it is possible to use so few power.

GPUs nowadays surely are extremely hightech and pretty fascinating. AMDs Radeon usualy was always playing a forerunner role on most of those stuff. Ofc the GPUs at high load are still burning a lot of energy, however, when we consider theyr insane computing power its something which can be tolerated to a certain extend.

Originally Posted by Bassplayer

Hokie... any ideas on subzero performance? Is that coming in the near future?

Dry ice isnt possible yet, since overvolt options is a must have in order to execute. It has been stated that the 7970 was able to reach the 41. rank of those kind of dry ice cooled stuff. So it means, its probably in the upper range of a absolutly supertuned 580 GTX, and the 7970 was still air cooled, not overvolted, and not on dry ice... so the gain can still be massive and it surely will beat any 580 GTX by a clear margin as soon as they are on "dry ice".